With the recent cold front that lashed Cape Town,bringing damaging winds with it,it seems safe to say the winter pattern has fallen into place.

Looking at the current jet stream position it's made a North turn and is steering the lows much closer towards South Africa.Looking at GFS and EURO weather models for the next week or two,it looks like a typical winter pattern with the lows generally staying at high latitude with high pressure cells building beneath them.

This coming weekend (May 10,11) another cold front associated with a deep low pressure is expected to move just South and the gradient will likely cause strong winds with possible rainfall around the Cape of 15-30mm over the weekend.

While it's not a full winter pattern yet as can be assumed,due to the nature of these fronts just brushing past and not reaching up country.If the pattern continues winter may be in full swing soon

elvina van Heerden

May 27, 2008 - 3:02PM

Re: Winter Arrived

never a truer word spoken - just two weeks later and Jhb is fresh frozen and very wet

Winter seems to be going as usual here in the Cape with various weak cold fronts passing,some areas of 50mm in 24 hours the other day as well as some thunderstorm cells ahead of the front.

But after this week of rain is done,some rainy days are possible around but the GFS model is not showing very strong fronts in the next two weeks (While the models will move around a lot) there is nothing really with low pressure.

With that said the model is moving some weak fronts with some decent amounts of rainfall through the cape region,question being how many of these fronts will make it far north.The ridging seems to be pretty strong on the model and will need to see.

Johannesburg has been rather dry the last few days apart from some isolated thunderstorms,and appears to be set that way for the next 5 or so days (apart from today and tomorrows thunderstorm possibility).But I did see the front pushed quite far north just kept a bit to the east,brought some snowfall up country